Monday, July 23, 2012

Catch of the Day

Here's one for Ed Kilgore, for calling out a very poorly thought out Thomas Edsall column that, as Kilgore says, equates running negative ads (purportedly designed primarily to convince soft Mitt Romney voters to stay home) with the GOP "war on voting" things such as voter id laws and purges of voter lists.

Kilgore:
Even if you buy Edsall’s assumption that the Obama campaign’s anti-Romney ads are designed to convince non-college educated white voters who won’t support the incumbent to give Romney a pass as well, it is fundamentally wrong to treat such efforts as equivalent to utilizing the power of government to bar voters from the polls altogether. Voters hypothetically convinced by the Obama ads to “stay home” in the presidential contest are perfectly free to skip that ballot line and vote their preferences for other offices, just as they are perfectly free to ignore both presidential campaigns’ attack ads and make a “hard choice” between two candidates they aren’t crazy about. Lumping negative ads together with voter disenfrancisement under the rubric of “vote suppression” legitimizes the latter as a campaign tactic rather than what it actually is: an assault on the exercise of fundamental democratic rights.
First of all, I completely agree with Kilgore's main point. Trying to convince voters to do something is just fundamentally difference from disenfranchising them; the one is unquestionably and completely legitimate politics, while the other is, well, difficult.

That is, I have to admit that I am somewhat ambivalent about the last bit I quoted from Kilgore. I do find what the Republicans have been doing appalling. And yet, when I think about it, I find that the case against it as a legitimate "campaign tactic" is harder to make than one might suspect.

Here's the problem: I am certain that full democracy does depend on every citizen having the vote; more broadly, it depends on every citizen having an opportunity to amass and use politically relevant resources, and the vote is essentially a gateway resource. On the other hand, politicians and parties are going to legitimately compete over votes, and we expect them to use whatever they have to do so. I'm tempted to say that just because in the US right now we happen to have one party which generally wants high turnout and another which wants low turnout, we should naturally expect one party to favor policies which make voting harder, and that's just how it goes. I do feel that way about other ground rules type policies which might have  partisan effects, whether it's redistricting or campaign finance. For example, I see nothing at all wrong with a majority party conducting a partisan gerrymander. That's just politics. I continue to believe that a "good government" view that we can have neutral ground rules and only compete on policy is wrong in all sorts of ways (among other things, because there's no neutral point from which to set those rules, because in a healthy politics as much as possible should be able to be contested if people do in fact disagree).

And yet...voting feels different, doesn't it? I guess it goes back to what I said above: voting really is the gateway resource. Even, perhaps, more so than speech. Surely, a polity which limits the franchise to only some citizens is (unless there's a damn good reason) going to be to that extent an imperfect or incomplete democracy. Or, if you prefer blunt interpretations, undemocratic at least to that extent. And so it's hard to say that a party's actions are legitimate in a democracy if they tend to make that nation undemocratic.

But as I said, I think it's a less clear-cut case than some might think.

What's not difficult at all, however, is the main case that Kilgore makes. Edsall could have made an interesting argument against negative ads by pointing out the potential effects and noting the surface similarity to GOP voter suppression...but what he actually wrote is basically calling those things one and the same, that's just not the case. And so: nice catch!

18 comments:

  1. I'm slightly disturbed at the way you wave off gerrymandering as obviously not subject to regular, apolitical civic control. International comparison would be useful here. Do Japan and the countries of western Europe have tales of redistricting in the newspapers every year? I don't know if they do or don't -- I'm asking the question.

    In other words, okay -- you see "nothing at all wrong" with such things because it's "just politics." But others might see it differently. You might be right about this, but it's not self-evidently right, you know?

    The function of democratic politics is to prosecute political decisions through the people that are affected by them. There's a line beyond which regular redistricting becomes a tactic with which an illegitimate majority/actual minority attempts to secure its hold on power through illegitimate means." In other words, for the GOP right now, vote suppression and gerrymandering have become central issues. That's not true of the Democrats.

    Last point: you say that you are in favor of having "every citizen" having access to the political process. Does this include children? I would be somewhat in favor of having children as young as 8 or 10 vote. The down sides of doing so seem to me largely nonexistent, or at least highly overstated, and it would provide large families, presumably a Republican demographic, with a modest bump.

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    1. The UK has plurality voting, with the ruling party usually getting a majority of seats with around 40% of votes, sometimes less. Still instead of rampant gerrymandering there is a boundary review process to keep the districts balanced.

      France has two-round voting. They're also balanced in the National Assembly, but I don't know if it's some kind of gentlemen's agreement or a law. In the somewhat less powerful Senate the rural areas are overrepresented, which is usually good for the center-right parties - but currently the center-left has a majority in the Senate, too.

      Germany has Proportional Representation on all levels (except for directly elected mayors; in that case there's two-round majority voting), and the Constitutional Court has struck down several elements that work against PR. This week it might do so again, on the federal level.

      I'm not sure about Japan, but I think they have some kind of imbalance that usually favors the center-right. Still, the current government is center-left (and it took them only a few decades to get there...)

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    2. "The UK has plurality voting, with the ruling party usually getting a majority of seats with around 40% of votes, sometimes less."

      This isn't right. It's only happened once in history (arguably twice if you count 1922) that a party has obtained a Parliamentary majority with less than 40% of the vote. Traditionally the threshold was around 44% for a Commons majority, although it's been a little lower in recent years.

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    3. Sorry, I was wrong on that point.

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  2. I'd also add that its helpful to look at the types of voter suppression the GOP is pushing right now as a variable, or a sort of measure of "undemocraticness" if you will. Just as Akron doesn't seem like a big city if you are from New York or London but it certainly has a degree of "urbaness" higher than a town like Sacred Heart MN (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sacred_Heart,_Minnesota). Likewise when these voter suppression efforts are combined with efforts to reduce early voting or make it harder to register to vote, which is what's happened in Florida recently, it's an even higher level "undemocraticness". The big thing to remember here from a comparative politics view is that it is totally possible to have a country with elections that in no way can be characterized as a democracy. For example, in Egypt in the 90s anyone who ran again Mubarak was arrested and put in jail and the election proceed as if it could possibly be called fair. Likewise in this country it was common to kidnap election judges on election day in some cities in the 19th century or threaten to lynch people who voted in the post-reconstruction South. These new efforts are just a milder version of these extreme measures from our past. So while requiring photo id doesn't make us a dictatorship is does damage our democracy the same way polls taxes and literacy tests did in our own history, and thus is substantially and categorically different than criticizing your opponent with TV adds. The same way its not violating free speech to criticize Edsall's poor writing and ignorance but to say confiscate his property and bank account, take away his right to vote and make it illegal for him to work in his profession with a state run libel suit would be a basic violation of free speech and freedom of the press. Oh and by the way that's what happens to journalists who criticize the government in Singapore.

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  3. I think the effects of Voter ID on turnout are overblown and probably won't amount to much because the group of people who don't have ID and won't get it and the group of people who don't vote overlap to a significant degree. So the idea that animates both parties' position on this issue, that Republicans will have an electoral advantage, is probably false.

    However, I still oppose voter ID, and the other voter suppression systems the Republicans are putting forward. The Republicans at their most sincere seem to be operating from the notion that voter fraud is so pernicious that it's better to stop thousands of eligible voters from voting to root it out. The Democrats' position is the opposite: it's better to allow for fraud occasionally if it means that every eligible voter can vote. I side with the latter position because voting is a fundamental right, and because the historical and contemporary evidence supports the idea that suppression is orders of magnitude more prevalent than fraud.

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  4. @Greg (7/23, 2:59 pm) Really? I don't know what the numbers are, but let's assume that your hypothesis is 50% correct---that is, half the people without a government-issued photo ID are people who regularly don't vote.

    That still leaves a whole lot of people---certainly enough to tip the results of any number of close elections---who regularly vote but don't have a government-issued photo ID.

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    1. I mean the people who don't have a photo ID and will not get one between now and the election.

      I'm sure there will be some disenfranchisement, but not enough to swing any races. Constituencies small enough to have a substantial number of people who are disenfranchised are probably so overwhelmingly Democratic that disenfranchising people won't change the outcome. Conversely, constituencies that are competitive between the parties won't have enough disenfranchised people to make a difference. And of course, it's important to remember that lots of Republicans will be disenfranchised too, and that will mitigate at least some of the partisan impact of the laws.

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    2. "...some disenfranchisement, but not enough to swing any races." You only need to remember presidential voting in 2000 in Florida to see how a small targeted amount of voter suppression might turn a race.

      Perhaps that's why Democrats are more focused on voter restrictions in OH and FL, rather than TX. But that shows where there is more payoff for the effort, or more local feeling against the voter restrictions (and more local Dems, too).

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  5. Adding, I understand that a certain level of dispassionate analysis is part of the culture of academia, but adding the historical context of voter suppression efforts in the US might (appropriately) lead one away from thinking that voter suppression is "part of the game" of partisan politics.

    Sure, there are the "goo-goos" who want policy separated from politics. There are also people as recently as the last few decades who've been beaten and/or assassinated for attempting to vote. That history matters.

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  6. Voter ID laws are just one of the tactics.

    There are others. My state recently knocked back a law passed by the Republican legislature and signed by the Republican governor, modeled on ALEC 'model laws' to eliminate same-day voter registration.

    Purges of voter rolls, as happened in FL in 2000 are another example of voter disenfranchisement; purging folk who have names even similar to known felons.

    And then there's the felon exceptions; there's some reason to think the war on drugs is used, in some states, to keep undesirable people from voting because they've been arrested on minor drug crimes.

    And I again need to point out: actual incidence of illegal voting is so rare as to be nearly statistically non-existant.

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  7. I think it's very difficult to have these discussions when the nature of the political system is itself contested. The view of democracy being pushed here is one of "collectively choosing how we wish to live" and viewing voting as the fundamental act of freedom. From this point of view, who cares if someone is technically qualified to vote - they really should have a say, and maybe we should give 10-year-olds and felons the vote too. So Republican actions look undemocratic and even illegitimate.

    But it is exactly this notion of democracy which Republicans are rejecting when they say things like we don't live in a democracy we live in a republic. This is the view that democratic elements in the system are useful because they provide stability and a way of ratifying consent. Basically, an election is cheaper than a revolution. Under this view, the purpose of government is the protection of fundamental rights, law and order, etc, and the system of government should be designed to best protect those ends. Voting isn't freedom, it's a way of protecting your freedom, which is things like the right to keep what you earn, the right to say what you like, the right to do what you like as long as it doesn't hurt others, etc. From this point of view, of course we shouldn't give felons and children the vote, because they are hardly likely to be responsible guardians of the national interest. And similarly, if someone is so lazy that they can't be bothered to get a photo ID, it seems very doubtful that we are missing out on a wise and informed ballot. From this point of view, it is Democrat actions which seem illegitimate.

    These disagreements are of course more nuanced than I've presented them here, but they're still fundamentally irreconcilable.

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    1. In other words, voting isn't freedom, it's a way of protecting privilege.

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  8. I think it's a really dangerous idea to think there's an obvious way to determine who is "hardly likely to be responsible guardians of the national interest" or who is unlikely to file "a wise and informed ballot." I could provide enough examples of rank dishonesty from Rush Limbaugh's radio show to make the case that anyone who learns about the issues from that program is not a responsible guardian of the national interest, and is not going to vote in a wise and informed manner. I doubt anyone would think that gives me the right to exclude their ballots.

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  9. Beyond saying that I agree with TN and zic, I'd start by saying that "democracy" and "republic" are for all practical purposes synonyms -- if you think they mean different things, and to be sure many do, you need to go back to basics and learn about it.

    The Framers used "Republic" because they looked to Rome, not Athens. But only sort of. They incorporated none of the nondemocratic elements of the Roman Republic into their American Republic.

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  10. Although no doubt sincerely meant, the points made by zic, TN and JB seem absurd to me. However, I don't wish to argue the substantive issue here. Rather, I will simply say that this illustrates my point very well - that there is a fundamentally irreconcilable difference in viewpoints which makes discussing these issues very difficult.

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    1. In your viewpoint, what are the necessary requirements for a person to be able to vote?

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    2. The key elements are capacity, responsibility and probity. Sometimes there may be some gray areas here, but categories like "children", "felons" and "people who can't prove they are who they say they are" seem like pretty easy calls.

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